Contemporary software development is aided in a large part by rich, interactive development environments (IDEs) that provide advanced features such as interactive debugging, context-sensitive editing, token coloring, code completion, the ability to easily lookup definitions and/or uses of symbols, incremental syntax/semantic checking and compilation, error correction and refactoring. One shortcoming of such environments has to do with the handling of annotations which can be interspersed between source code statements. By way of example, annotations can provide directives for code generation, specify runtime behaviors, and arrange for other capabilities not expressed in the source code. An annotation value itself can be specified as a statement in a given programming language. However, when a user attempts to enter or modify the annotation's value, the advanced features discussed above which are available for source code editing vanish. What is needed is a way to provide the same richness to the annotation editing experience.